Marketing Frameworks Overwhelming Your Content Strategy?

Last Updated on April 6, 2025.

And no, I don’t mean the traditional marketing models.

As small business owners and marketers, we are thankful for the Internet. I would not even be speaking to you right now otherwise. But you’re also likely inundated with new courses, frameworks and methodologies with the promise to make you market yourself better, go viral, make 10k months and the list goes on and on. There are just SO many options out there and it can be hard to know which ones are worth your time to speak to your target audience – and which will leave you feeling overwhelmed. Welcome to marketing frameworks overload.

Let’s make one thing clear: marketing frameworks are essential. They can help businesses understand their customers and target markets and guide marketing efforts. I use them in all of my clients’ marketing campaigns to help me determine marketing strategies.

It just becomes a matter of making sure it is the right fit for you and your business and is something you can use long-term and not just purchase because of FOMO.

So with so many different marketing frameworks to choose from, how do you know which one is best for your business?

The thing to note here is the difference between a content marketing framework you can evolve with and a framework that is supposed to act as a step-by-step guide that you cannot iterate on, learn from or even know if it is working. Despite their success, their customers are not their customers, and you need to be able to understand the basic structure of the framework to iterate and change and learn how to do so within the framework being taught. And if you cannot, it may not be the framework for you, especially since it probably will take even longer to figure out it is not working since you have no true goalposts if the only goalpost is to follow the method.

If a past purchase has burned you, you fear the wrong framework, or you are experiencing framework fatigue – sometimes it’s just good to go back to the basics to speak to your target market – what are your main goals and what valuable insights can you provide them? These frameworks are where it all began for me, are some of the most popular marketing models, are considered best practices and are what I always go back to if I feel stuck while working on a marketing strategy.

The bottom line is that these are just three of many frameworks you are going to discover on your content marketing journey, but they have personally been some of the best frameworks for my personal development as a marketer allowing me to create the right content at the right time of the funnel.

Buyer’s Journey

The buyer’s journey is a process that all buyers go through, from discovering that they may have an issue to buying a product or service. The journey consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. You may have also heard this described as what stage of the customer journey a client is in.

• Awareness: During the awareness stage, your buyer becomes aware of the need or problem they want to solve; this is the overall brand awareness stage for your business.
• Consideration: In the consideration stage, your buyer learns more about their options and starts to decide which is best for them; they may begin to learn more about the benefits of your product and how it effects them.
• Decision: And finally, they can purchase and experience the results in the decision stage.

Marketing Funnel

Unfortunately, all my friends have heard me talk about TOFU, MOFU, BOFU – what are these bizarre adjectives?

• Top of Funnel: The first stage of the customer’s journey, it consists of attracting attention and generating interest in a product or service. You are making the customer aware that there is a solution to their problem.
• Middle of the Funnel: As customers become engaged with your business through content that begins to solve their problems, you have captured their attention (and possibly their information) and they can begin to consider you when they want to solve their problems and/or purchase a product or service.
• Bottom of the Funnel: Your customers are ready to make a decision and hopefully, with the help you have provided them along the way, you are the first name they think of. Once they make their decision, you want to ensure that you delight them in order to retain them and have them possibly refer you.

So you may have noticed one thing, it corresponds directly to the buyer’s journey and is another way to look at the stages that buyers go through while making their decision, allowing us to align our marketing goals with their customer experience.

Flywheel Model

When the flywheel model was introduced to me by HubSpot (I believe at an Inbound conference), I distinctly remember being like, “duh.” It made TOTAL sense. As much as I love the marketing funnels above, there was one essential item that was being ignored, and the flywheel model answered it: things are not always linear perfection; your customers are at the center of your marketing, not an afterthought. They do have a voice when they talk about you to others. It doesn’t mean I completely abandoned the two above, but I like remembering that there is more to it than just the three stages.

You can see at the very center we still have the three stages: attract, engage, and delight, but the focuses are not entirely the same. The main goal of the flywheel model is to reduce friction in your business and make it as easy as possible for the customer.

• Attract: Content and your potential customer being able to find you is the focus. Your content should be valuable, helpful and more importantly, easy to find with a combination of SEO, social media and maybe even targeted digital ads.
• Engage: Create a meaningful relationship with your customers and potential customers. Let them learn about your products, services and unique selling proposition on their terms and provide them with ways to engage with you – whether it is nurture campaigns, a chat on your site, interactive content or additional benefits or information to help them with their problems.
• Delight: Continue to delight your existing customers’ past purchases, whether that is your customer support, rewards programs, nurturing campaigns or user-generated content.

Using frameworks like this will allow you to outline your overall strategy and then determine what tactics you want to include in each stage of your marketing strategy to each your specific goals. It allows you to be flexible and to iterate based on your specific business strategy and needs. To take it a step further, make sure you have key performance indicators (KPIs), such as engagement for early stages or conversation rate for any lower funnel stages, to determine if your content strategy is working. And while it may be part of the core elements for some of the programs you have purchased, knowing these basics will allow you to ensure that you can tailor them no matter what.

So, think it through before clicking purchase because it sounds like an offer you cannot resist (we’ve all been there!). Carefully consider how you or your team use it. How will it fit into your marketing plan. Make sure it is not beyond your capabilities; and that the marketing framework does actually fit your needs AT THE MOMENT. Even more importantly, your target customers will relate to it before it leads to frustration and wasted time and money.